How To Edit a (Live) Conversation
Acting like an editor will make your chats more dynamic.
As a magazine editor, part of my job is to cut away verbal fat. The boring parts, repetitions, whatever needs cutting. I’m also a student of compelling conversation (I wrote a book made of unusual and uncanny ones).
So I took note when I was increasingly getting marooned in frustrating chats, even when I thought the other person interesting and they thought I was interesting. Somehow we’d often find ourselves stuck talking about something neither of us cared about or something we talked about with every single person, frequently just going through the verbal motions, all the air time gobbled up with bland updates or something tired. Then I had a thought. What if I approached conversations with the lens of an editor?
It’s reductive to characterize small talk as the main and only villain since it can have a useful function as a warm-up or an easing in or a boundary setter , but it also norms conversation and leaves us beholden to the same old rules and systems, frequently inhibiting deeper, more searching dialogue. Here’s a few core tactics I’ve discovered for acting as an…
